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National Guard Company E
National Guard Company E of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, was an early pioneer in basketball leading Midwest power, taking second in the national AAU men’s championship tournament in 1901. Basketball was first played in Fond du Lac in the fall of 1896, when a team was formed by members of Company E, Second National Guard unit. In the season of 1898-99, following their return from the Spanish-American War, Company E formed a new and most formidable team. The team had great players in A. G. “Butch” Brunkhorst as forward and Roy Rogers as coach and other forward. Other players were Trier, Buch, Severin, Brugger, and 6-foot-5 center W. Bruett. In 1900, the Fond du Lac team met Yale University for the “Championship of the United States.” Yale traveled all the way to Fond du Lac, and there played three games with E Company, and lost every one. Fond du Lac was the self-designated national champs. The Fond du Lac team also met the powerful Ravenswood YMCA team in its home gymnasium, 17-15 in the Ravenswood's home gymnasium. Playing for Fond du Lac were Rogers, Brunkhorst, W. Bruett, A. Bruett, and Bud. The 1901 Company E had championship quality as well, and included beside the veterans forward Butch Brunkhorst and the big center W. Bruett, also had J. Brunkhorst (perhaps brother to Butch), Burnett, and Utter. The team proved its worth at the 1901 national AAU tournament held in Chicago in the second week of March at the Coliseum as part of the First Annual Sportsmen’s Show, sponsored by the International Forest, Fish, and Game Association. The tournament was conducted as a round robin format, and participants besides National Guard Company E, were Ravenswood YMCA, Stevens Point, Wisconsin; West Side YMCA; Kenton; the University of Minnesota; University of Nebraska; Kenton; and a deaf mute team from New York called the Silent Five. The Company E team got to the title game by a highly contentious and disputed path. The officials had planned on the round robin determining the championship, but on March 12 decided to finish with a playoff. The round robin series had up to that point left Company E and Ravenswood each with 2-1 records, and Stevens Point and Kenton each with 3-1 records. The officials ruled that in the afternoon Company E and Ravenswood would play each other and Stevens Point and Kenton would play each other, and the winners of each game would play for the championship that night. http://hoopedia.nba.com/index.php?title=Image:CompanyE14.jpgNational Guard Company E team 1913-1914 season The Kenton team refused to play the afternoon game, objecting to playing two games in one day. The Stevens Point team asserted it had not been notified. When neither team showed up at their appointed playoff time, the officials credited each with a forfeit, making the afternoon game between Ravenswood and Company E the championship game. Company E lost a close game, 16-15. The Company E team went through a decade of mediocrity, but then in the 1911-12 team they got a new manager in Charles Wright and a great player in George Forgarty. In the next three years, Fond du Lac played 119 games, won 110 and lost 9. Not too shabby. In the 1913-14 season Company E won 39 straight games. Their streak was broken by the Oswego Indians, which played them in a three game series, in which the Indians won the middle game. The team came to an end in 1914, because the following year, because of trouble with Pancho Villa on the border of Mexico, the unit moved south, and after the entrance of the United States in World War I the unit moved overseas to France.